Ikea home for chicks

It constantly amazes me how Ikea hackers find new ways to use good old Ikea goodies. Aaron Bell and wife Corinne design a cozy Ikea home for a few cute chicks.He says, “My wife and I recently got into urban chicken farming and built a coop for them almost completely out of materials from Ikea.”

The coop frame is made from the bunk bed. We hacked the supports to make mounting the roof easier, and used the leftover slats from the top bunk for the side paneling. The storage unit with drawers is beingused for the chicken’s beds, and I used more leftover wood to construct the hinged door on the side to make egg collection easier.

The front door is also leftover wood from the bed. Once the frame was assembled, we weatherproofed the frame, as the bunk bed wood comes unfinished from Ikea. Also, we laid down plywood for the floor of thecoop, using slats for support.

The bottle rack made a very nice (and cheap) ramp up to the beds, and the legs provide extra support for the heavy storage unit.

The only non-Ikea pieces we used were the mesh, plywood/beams for the roof (which is 3x coated with reflective paint in an attempt to keep the heat out), and the hardware for the hinges and latches.

We hung the feeder and waterer from the roof with a very simple washer / bolt / s-hook hack job. All told, this project took a month’s worth of weekends, and was a blast to complete.

Hey Aaron, GREAT coop! I heard about it on poultrycommunity.com If you ever have ANY questions about what to do with your chickens (disease, feed, predators, whatever) you should come check it out. There are tons of wonderful chicken folks on there with lots of knowledge. I voted for ya…hope that helps!

Great ideas! Lots of great chicken information on backyardchickens.com — hundreds of plans with pictures, breeds, breeders, forums, etc. This site has many many different topics and you can find everything you need to learn how to keep chickens. My husband and I built a coop into the back 4 x 8 feet of our garden shed by putting a wall up and a window and door, with attached run. On mypetchicken.com you can compare breeds and order as few as 2 chicks, instead of the ususal 25 you need to buy at the big hatcheries.

Aaron – we’re actually considering moving the nesting boxes to the outside of the coop (we’ll probably have to trim it down to 2 boxes instead of 3). Both to give the chickens more room (even though they aren’t in it yet) and to prevent them from sleeping – and pooping – on top of it.

leanne, your coop looks great. Glad we could lend a creative hand. You’re right — that bunk bed does lend itself well to this use.

If it’s any help to you now, you might consider putting something on top of the shelve unit. Our chickens have taken to sleeping up there, and although they haven’t started laying yet, we’re afraid they’ll just do it up there instead of in the beds.

You totally inspired me! We just finished our chicken coop based on that bunk bed, even though it’ll be a few more weeks until the chicks can live there. I love that once you have the bed frame up the rest becomes completely customizeable. We sloped the roof (corrugated roof panel) down so water would fall onto the lawn. Plus, we didn’t have to buy additional wood at all! All the mattress support slats were used around the sides and to make the nesting box door.http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AatWLNo2cNmTrg&emid=sharview&linkid=link4&cid=EMsharview

You can have chickens in alot more cities than you’d think. Mine (lakewood, CA allows 5 hens. Long Beach CA even more, no limit, they just can’t be “a nuisance” and in Huntington Beach, CA i know they allow 6 hens/house

Thank you for your kind feedback. I’ll post more pics of this on my Flickr feed later tonight. There’ll be before and after shots.

@Marleen, It might be fox-proof, but it’s not dog-proof. We used the green plastic chicken mesh. I am planning on replacing that with wire mesh to protect them better (our four original chickens were killed when a foster dog broke into the coop; three new chicks have since taken their place).

@The Homely Animal @woof nanny,

My wife researched pre-cut coops that you’d just assemble yourself, and those were $800-$1k. She came up with the idea of going IKEA to save money, so we took a trip and finally landed on the bunk bed. We considered other options but this (with the shelves for beds) was by far the best, in our opinions. All said, we did it for about $400.

The best part was coming up with creative ways to use the leftover wood. 🙂